Posts tagged with: cms

Several months ago (ugh, time flies) I posted a screencast demo'ing a semantic HTML editor. Back then I used a combination of client-side and server-side components, which I have to admit led to quite a number of unnecessary server round-trips.

In the meantime, others have shown that powerful client-side editors can be implemented on top of HTML5, and so I've now rewritten the whole thing and turned it into a pure JavaScript tool as well. It now supports inline WYSIWYG editing and HTML5 Microdata annotations.

The code is still at beta stage, but today I put up an early demo website which I'll use as a sandbox. The editor is called Swipe (like the dance move, but it's an acronym, too). What makes Swipe special is its ability to detect the caret coordinates even when the cursor is inside a text node, which is usually not possible with W3C range objects. This little difference enables several new possibilities, like precise in-place annotations or "linked-data-as-you-type" functionality for user-friendly entity suggestions. More to come soon...

Let's face it, building semantic web sites and apps is still far from easy. And to some extent, this is due to the configuration overhead. The RDF stack is built around declarative languages (for simplified integration at various levels), and as a consequence, configuration directives often end up in some form of declarative format, too. While fleshing out an RDF-powered website, you have to declare a ton of things. From namespace abbreviations to data sources and API endpoints, from vocabularies to identifier mappings, from queries to object templates, and what have you.

Sadly, many of these configurations are needed to style the user interface, and because of RDF's open world context, designers have to know much more about the data model and possible variations than usually necessary. Or webmasters have to deal with design work. Not ideal either. If we want to bring RDF to mainstream web developers, we have to simplify the creation of user-optimized apps. The value proposition of semantics in the context of information overload is pretty clear, and some form of data integration is becoming mandatory for any modern website. But the entry barrier caused by large and complicated configuration files (Fresnel anyone?) is still too high. How can we get from our powerful, largely generic systems to end-user-optimized apps? Or the other way round: How can we support frontend-oriented web development with our flexible tools and freely mashable data sets? (Let me quickly mention Drupal here, which is doing a great job at near-seamlessly integrating RDF. OK, back to the post.)

Enter RDF widgets. Widgets have obvious backend-related benefits like accessing, combining and re-purposing information from remote sources within a manageable code sandbox. But they can also greatly support frontend developers. They simplify page layouting and incremental site building with instant visual feedback (add a widget, test, add another one, re-arrange, etc.). And, more importantly in the RDF case, they can offer a way to iteratively configure a system with very little technical overhead. Configuration options could not only be scoped to the widget at hand, but also to the context where the widget is currently viewed. Let's say you are building an RDF browser and need resource templates for all kinds of items. With contextual configuration, you could simply browse the site and at any position in the ontology or navigation hierarchy, you would just open a configuration dialog and define a custom template, if needed. Such an approach could enable systems that worked out of the box (raw, but usable) and which could then be continually optimized, possibly even by site users.

A lot of "could" and "would" in the paragraphs above, and the idea may sound quite abstract without actually seeing it. To illustrate the point I'm trying to make I've prepared a short video (embedded below). It uses Semantic CrunchBase and Paggr Prospect (our new faceted browser builder) as an example use case for in-context configuration.

And if you are interested in using one of our solutions for your own projects, please get in touch!

A screencast demonstrating the structured RTE bundled with the Trice CMS

In my previous post I mentioned that I'm building a Linked Data CMS. One of its components is a rich-text editor that allows the creation (and embedding) of structured markup.

An earlier version supported limited Microdata annotations, but now I've switched the mechanism and use an intermediate, but even simpler approach based on HTML5's handy data-* attributes. This lets you build almost arbitrary markup with the editor, including Microformats, Microdata, or RDFa. I don't know yet when the CMS will be publicly available (3 sites are under development right now), but as mentioned, I'd be happy about another pilot project or two. Below is a video demonstrating the editor and its easy customization options.

A combination of RDFa and Microdata would allow for separate semantic layers.

Apart from grumpy rants about the complexity of W3C's RDF specs and semantic richtext editing excitement, I haven't blogged or tweeted a lot recently. That's partly because there finally is increased demand for the stuff I'm doing at semsol (agency-style SemWeb development), but also because I've been working hard on getting my tools in a state where they feel more like typical Web frameworks and apps. Talis' Fanhu.bz is an example where (I think) we found a good balance between powerful RDF capabilities (data re-purposing, remote models, data augmentation, a crazy army of inference bots) and a non-technical UI (simplistic visual browser, Twitter-based annotation interfaces).

Another example is something I've been working on during the last months: I somehow managed to combine essential parts of Paggr (a drag&drop portal system based on RDF- and SPARQL-based widgets) with an RDF CMS (I'm currently looking for pilot projects). And although I decided to switch entirely to Microdata for semantic markup after exploring it during the FanHubz project, I wonder if there might be room for having two separate semantic layers in this sort of widget-based websites. Here is why:

As mentioned, I've taken a widget-like approach for the CMS. Each page section is a resource on its own that can be defined and extended by the web developer, it can be styled by themers, and it can be re-arranged and configured by the webmaster. In the RDF CMS context, widgets can easily integrate remote data, and when the integrated information is exposed as machine-readable data in the front-end, we can get beyond the "just-visual" integration of current widget pages and bring truly connectable and reusable information to the user interface.

Ideally, both the widgets' structural data and the content can be re-purposed by other apps. Just like in the early days of the Web, we could re-introduce a copy & paste culture of things for people to include in their own sites. With the difference that RDF simplifies copy-by-reference and source attribution. And both developers and end-users could be part of the game this time.

Anyway, one technical issue I encountered is when you have a page that contains multiple page items, but describes a single resource. With a single markup layer (say Microdata), you get a single tree where the context of the hierarchy is constantly switching between structural elements and content items (page structure -> main content -> page layout -> widget structure -> widget content). If you want to describe a single resource, you have to repeatedly re-introduce the triple subject ("this is about the page structure", "this is about the main page topic"). The first screenshot below shows the different (grey) widget areas in the editing view of the CMS. In the second screenshot, you can see that the displayed information (the marked calendar date, the flyer image, and the description) in the main area and the sidebar is about a single resource (an event).

Trice CMS editing view

Trice CMS page view with inline widgets describing one resource

If I used two separate semantic layers, e.g. RDFa for the content (the event description) and Microdata for the structural elements (column widths, widget template URIs, widget instance URIs), I could describe the resource and the structure without repeating the event subject in each page item.

To be honest, I'm not sure yet if this is really a problem, but I thought writing it down could kick off some thought processes (which now tend towards "No"). Keeping triples as stand-alone-ish as possible may actually be an advantage (even if subject URIs have to be repeated). No semantic markup solution so far provides full containment for reliable copy & paste, but explicit subjects (or "itemid"s in Microdata-speak) could bring us a little closer.

Conclusions? Err.., none yet. But hey, did you see the cool CMS screenshots?